Lou Rawls

Music is the greatest communication in the world.

In Kansas City joints ran 9pm-5am. Pay was a $1.25 a night but somebody special like Count Basie could command $1.50.

That’s the thing about jazz: it’s free flowing, it comes from your soul.

If you play a tune and a person don’t tap their feet, don’t play the tune.

Jimmy (Wakely) told me, ‘I don’t want you to sound so much like Dinah Washington.’ So, I thought, ‘How can I get around this?’ And one of the people I really dug was Patti Page. So I thought, ‘Oh, I’m going to sound like her.’ I actually did with a couple curly-cues thrown in for effect, but, that’s how I started getting away from the predominant Dinah influence, and getting my own style together.

If I were to call it black music, that would be untrue. I don’t know what that is, unless it would be some African drums or something.

To keep creating you have to be about change.

As far as music school goes, I walked through Berkelee one time.

Musicians need to continue higher learning try to expand the pallet.

Music should enrich the soul; it should teach spirituality by showing a person a portion of himself that he would not discover otherwise. It’s easy to rediscover part of yourself, but through art you can be shown part of yourself you never knew existed. That’s the real mission of art. The artist has to find something within himself that’s universal and which he can put into terms that are communicable to other people. The magic of it is that art can communicate to a person without his realizing it.

When I start writing songs and it turns into an overly belabored intellectual process, I just throw it out.

Some people feel the rain. Others just get wet.

A great thing about being a musician is you don’t stop until the day you die.

When there was vinyl, I just loved opening a record and smelling that wonderful smell.

I’m not like a legend that – so I’m sort of in the middle in this sort of gray area where, you know, I’m creating music, and I’m not saying there isn’t an audience, because there is; because all of those people go out and spend $80 to $150 on a concert ticket.

I don’t get jazz. It always sounds like a bunch of toddlers let loose in a music room.